| March 27, 2025 Quick Note Last week’s email talked about my evolution into a person who thought of herself as the Catcher In The Rye. Coincidentally, it appears that both houses of the Texas legislature have introduced bills making it a crime for librarians and teachers to provide books that contain sexually explicit content, punishable by up to ten years in prison. It removes an exception in current law that allows providing such content if done in pursuit of a scientific, educational, or governmental purpose. They highlight books such as Catcher In The Rye as examples of works that would no longer get the exception. Who knew we were ahead of our time? Now, on to this week’s thoughts… The Magic Eraser Among a number of losses, perhaps growing out of the aging process, is a phenomenon I’ve come to call The Magic Eraser. One day, I will remember the name of my third grade teacher. A few days later, it is gone. One day I can clearly picture the crowd around the table at my parents’ Fiftieth Anniversary party. The next day, not. It seems, however, that our seriously demented wanna-be Emperor With No Clothes has opted to put his fat thumb on the scale and use enforced invisibility as a tool to reshape the history and the memories of America. He has decided that any mention of Black, Latino, Asian, Native American, female or LGBTQ+ people as champions, patriots, or just plain shining examples, doesn’t fit his cockeyed notion that only white, straight men should be officially recognized as heroes, pioneers, or anything positive. To accomplish this, he illegally waves his imaginary powers and orders any references to them in Pentagon records or federal cemeteries removed. Poof! Throughout both World Wars, critical messages were sent by the Allies in codes never cracked by our enemies. These codes were based on the never-written-down native languages of Indigenous Americans, many of them Navajo. These “Code Talkers” were credited with many victories including our invasion of Iwo Jima, sending more than 800 messages for that action, alone, in a Code that was never broken. At least ten articles detailing the heroic work of these men were erased from US military websites and the sites re-labeled as DEI. God forbid anyone should learn of the heroics of those men, because they were not white. Another Native American, Ira Hayes, a much decorated Marine who was one of the men in the iconic photo raising the flag on Iwo Jima, had also been erased. He was a member of the Pima tribe in Arizona. His story was labeled DEI. The same happened to pages honoring the heroic women who served in the military such as the women who ferried planes across the country during World War II as a part of the Women Air Force Service Pilots (the WASPs). Poof! Similarly, and startlingly, the Arlington National Cemetery deleted many of its pages containing the histories of Black, Latino, and female veterans. Poof! We are told that some of these outrages have been corrected and reference pages restored. As with other reversals, however, by the self-crowned Trump and his evil Cardinal Richamusk, it is difficult to tell. But, there’s more. Most amusing, if you happen to have the kind of alien sense of humor I do, is the wider scan they have done to find any mention of the word Gay and to erase any reference containing that word. Hence, the story of the Enola Gay, the plane that carried the atomic bomb to Hiroshima, has been erased, not because it was responsible for one of the most horrific acts of World War II, but because its name was Gay. Several heroes who happened to have committed the same sin of having Gay as their last name have also disappeared. So, goodbye all you Firsts. Goodbye to you great examples for all of us and not just your people. Goodbye, all you who identify as anything but white, straight, and male. In Law School, I learned about something called the Magic Erasure Theory. This useful guideline provides that a law found by the highest court to be unconstitutional, though it might remain in print in various books or sites, is Magically Erased and need not be obeyed. Trump admires this theory and has decided to apply it to any law he doesn’t like. Automatically an American citizen because you were born in this country? With the stroke of a pen, just sign an executive order and change the Constitution to make this not so. Poof! Any right to Due Process before you are kidnapped, chained, shaved, humiliated, beaten and put on a plane to a criminally abusive El Salvador prison simply on the word of a rogue President? Poof! Trample on the Constitutional power of the Congress to allocate the budget and just go in and fire thousands of people, terminate international programs, close government offices serving millions of Americans? Poof! To drive the point home, Universities were instructed to end all programs that deal with the histories of our many minority communities, to stop sponsoring gatherings celebrating any of those histories, and to apply a magic eraser so that the only stories of brave action permissible to report were those performed by white men. This demand is to be applied on a going forward basis by removing any and all federal funding from institutions of higher education that dare to even mention a preference for a diverse student body or faculty. Since the searches for all of these references are conducted by artificial dumbness (I just can’t call it intelligence), I’m waiting to learn if former US Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black has disappeared from the history of the Court, simply because of his unfortunate minority name. Speaking of history lessons… Musk’s Grandfather and the Eerie Echoes of Technocracy Inc. Pakistani writer, activist and historian, Tariq Ali, wrote, “History rarely repeats itself, but its echoes never go away.” This is jaw-droppingly true in the case of Elon Musk’s outsized and mesmerizing influence on the president and how many of the current administration’s proposals and actions mirror the beliefs and tenets of the movement and political party with which Elon Musk’s grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, was aligned. Haldeman lived in Canada in the 1930s, when he became deeply engaged with a political movement called Technocracy Inc., a party whose many tenets sound eerily familiar today. They advocated for the replacement of representative democracy with a government run by scientists and engineers. The goal was efficiency by centralizing decision making in a hierarchical few. Haldeman was sympathetic with the rise of the Nazis in Germany, as was Technocracy Inc. The movement was autocratic by nature, and, in 1941, both the Canadian and US governments branded it an illegal fascist organization. Under wartime concerns, both countries banned the organization. Several tenets of the Technocracy movement are reflected in the beliefs of Elon Musk and, by virtue of his influence over the White House, in the announced goals of the current administration. First among these, of course, is the rejection of representative democracy, especially as reflected in the constitutional balance of power. The preferred method of government is autocracy. Second, the Technocracy movement was extremely isolationist, and did not support alignment with allies. It advocated solely for the preservation of the Technate’s own interests. Third, Technocracy Inc., citing the failures of the Great Depression, believed that all banks and financial institutions were controlled by a vast, Jewish, international conspiracy. They advocated for a new kind of value to underpin currency internationally which they called “energy credits.” The credits’ value was to be derived from the number of energy inputs required to produce each thing and apportioned appropriately. Musk’s regard for cryptocurrency, with no basis for its value but the energy it takes to create it and to track it is eerily similar. Technocracy, Inc. also maintained that the same, Jewish international conspiracy stood, shadow-like, behind the fluoridation of water, the pasteurization of milk and mass vaccine programs. When the Party inevitably splintered and failed, Haldeman joined the Social Credit Party, and quickly rose to a party leadership position. He went on to defend the Party’s publication of a now-famous fabricated text called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This sham document, drawn up to detail an invented Jewish plan for world domination, played a key part in spreading hatred and fear of Jews, a basic tool of German fascism. Panama? Greenland? Technocracy, Inc. proposed that the world should be divided into a number of large, united spheres called “Technates” in order to make governance more efficient. One of these suggested spheres (and there are maps) included much of the Western Hemisphere and, in particular, mentioned uniting Greenland, Canada, the US and Panama. The current description of a historical print of the map of this area, offered by Boston Rare Maps, includes a comment from the map seller opining that the configuration has “…unnerving resonance with the economic and geopolitical program of the second Trump administration.” Those affiliated with the Technocracy, Inc. movement were also often designated by numbers (Musk’s grandfather was referred to as 10450-1), rather than names, and, in many cases, added the letter X as a part of those number-names. It seems not to be coincidental that Musk has named his son X, as well as choosing X as the name of the social media darling formerly known as Twitter. In 1950, following a serendipitous meeting with a traveling cleric from South Africa, Musk’s grandfather decided to move his family to Pretoria. He was drawn by the cleric’s description of apartheid and the superior station of the white population. After the move, Haldeman remained a strong supporter of apartheid, joined the National Party of South Africa and even wrote a piece for a Canadian newspaper defending apartheid in very strong, racist, terms. You can decide for yourself whether Elon may have been influenced by all of this. The Times of London published an article by Matthew Sweet indicating there are many who do. I am, personally, more of a fan of synchronicity than of coincidence. I say, connect the dots. Sheila |